Month: October 2013

WiFi-Enabled Arduino Fio using the WiFly RN-XV (RN171XV)

Steven A. Cholewiak Leave a comment

The Arduino Fio is a nice little Arduino board designed specifically to interface with XBee devices. I think it’s a great little board and have used it quite a bit in the past. BUT, I haven’t talked too much about the XBee interface, so for this post, I wanted to demonstrate an example utilizing the XBee socket to get an Arduino Fio onto the web. This is a simple example, just demonstrating communication with the Microchip RN171XV (previously Roving Networks RN-XV) wifi module.

WiFlyTimeWithConsole Example

Click through the break for information on the setup and source code to get the Arduino Fio onto the web.
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Magic Lantern HDR video to tonemapped video with MATLAB scripts

Steven A. Cholewiak Leave a comment

I have a Canon T3i with a Canon EF 50mm f1.4 lens that I use for the gross majority of my day-to-day photography these days. I’ve been using a custom firmware for the Canon called Magic Lantern that provides a some interesting (and useful!) functions. One of them is HDR video. Here’s a beautiful example of what can be done:

I tried my hand at processing the HDR video output and was able to get a reasonably nice tone-mapped video:

After the break, you’ll find how I processed the initial Magic Lantern video using MATLAB and exiftool and tone-mapped the output using Luminance HDR.

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Preparing a “Blobby” Object for Printing with Shapeways

Steven A. Cholewiak 1 Comment

I have been working with a 3D blobby object for some of my pilot studies on shape from shading and texture that I would like to 3D print. Back at Rutgers University, we had a MakerBot Cupcake, but now that I am in Germany, I need to find alternatives. I have been looking into getting the 3D object printed using Shapeways.com but there have been a few hiccups along the way, so I wanted to describe my experiences in the hopes that it might help someone else avoid these issues in the future. The object was generated in MATLAB using a simple script (see 3D “Potato” Generation using Sinusoidal Pertubations) and rendered in our 3D environment:

3D-Blobby-Object---Solid-(Seed--0431630057)

So the question is: What do I need to do to get this 3D object printed at Shapeways? Click through to see the steps that I took to get this 3D model printed economically.
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